Mass Killings Aren't the Real Gun Problem

How to tailor gun-control measures to common crimes, not aberrant catastrophes

ENLARGE

Students after a mass shooting at Virginia Tech University in 2007.
Agence France- Presse/Getty Images

By

Gary Kleck

Updated Jan. 15, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

Mass killings make for lurid news coverage—and human tragedy—but they aren't the real problem when it comes to gun violence. We can't hope to stop utterly unique crimes, and crimes that unfold in bizarre ways are rarely repeated. Sensible gun-control policies have to respond to the kinds of crime that occur relatively frequently, in familiar patterns of behavior. The more narrowly we try to tailor policies to atypical crimes like mass shootings, the less likely they are to save lives.

Over the past week, many supporters of gun control have argued that weak gun laws somehow contributed to the tragic shooting in Tucson. A spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Stop Gun Violence, for example, attributed the high death toll to the absence of any federal or state ban on large-capacity magazines for ammunition, asserting that "many lives could have been saved if [Jared Loughner] had to stop shooting at 10 rounds." Other critics noted that Arizona does not require a permit to carry guns openly in public places. Still others suggested that better gun laws would have prevented a mentally ill person like Mr. Loughner from buying a gun in the first place.

But none of these policies would have done much to prevent this particular crime. Arizona law already forbids the sale of guns to persons found by a court to be a danger to themselves or others, but no court had made that determination for Mr. Loughner. No state has or could have a comprehensive registry of all mentally ill persons (or of all those who have sought treatment for mental health problems). Advocates for the mentally ill rightly object that denying rights to those who seek treatment for emotional problems would discourage them from seeking such services.

Nor did Arizona's lenient attitude toward the open carrying of guns have anything to do with the shootings, since the killer carried his handgun concealed. Arizona law already forbids the concealed carrying of a gun "in the furtherance of a serious offense." In any case, it is far-fetched to think that a person set on mass murder would refrain from carrying a concealed gun to the scene of a crime because it's illegal to do so.

The Tucson shooting was very different from typical gun murders in several crucial respects beside the number and identity of the victims. First, this crime, like most other mass murders, was the result of premeditation and advance planning, as indicated by letters left in Mr. Loughner's home. He had been considering the assassination for months, possibly for years. Most gun murder is impulsive and unpremeditated. He also was powerfully motivated to carry out the crime, given that he was willing to die committing it or end up spending his life in prison or a mental institution. In a letter saying goodbye to his friends, he apologized for what he was planning to do.

Even as a mass murder, this shooting was atypical. Most mass killers use multiple guns, but Mr. Loughner used only one (though he reportedly owned others). The availability of large-capacity magazines is certainly irrelevant to ordinary gun violence, which usually involves few or no shots fired, but it is even irrelevant to virtually all mass shootings, because the shooters either have multiple guns, making it easy to fire many rounds without reloading, or they have ample time and opportunity to reload because there is no one present willing to stop them while they reload.

When there are willing interveners, it limits how much death and injury a shooter can inflict with the initial magazine; the smaller the magazine, the fewer the victims. Unfortunately, these conditions almost never prevail in mass shootings. In the Tucson shooting, two bystanders did tackle the killer, but apparently only after he had successfully inserted a second magazine into his gun, its spring failed, and he started to flee. I am aware of only one mass shooting—on a Long Island commuter train in 1993—that involved both a shooter armed with a single gun and bystanders willing to stop the shooter when he attempted to reload.

It is easy to fall into lazy reasoning and to argue that additional gun restrictions "can't do any harm and might do some good." But there are costs to restricting guns as well as possible benefits. Any restrictions that limit the availability of guns for criminal purposes also limit their availability for self-protection. There is strong empirical evidence showing that the use of guns for self-protection is both frequent and effective. Victims who use guns for defense in crime incidents are less likely to be injured or lose property than otherwise similar victims who either do nothing to resist or adopt other self-protection strategies. Making guns unavailable for self-defense can therefore cost lives, and this cost must be taken into account when considering the possible slight benefit of measures that would prevent only the rarest of crimes.

Ironically, promoting gun control by touting its purported relevance to mass killings may serve to discredit gun-control measures intended to prevent the single-victim incidents that inflict far more aggregate harm on Americans. Because certain measures will do nothing to prevent mass shootings, some people also will reject them as a tool for combating ordinary violence. Well-enforced laws against carrying guns may discourage criminals who commit unpremeditated acts of violence from routinely being armed, even if such laws had no effect on Mr. Loughner. Increasing the availability and usability of existing databases on the dangerously mentally ill (limited though their coverage may be) could have some value in blocking gun sales to the kinds of people who commit more common kinds of violence, even if they could not have stopped the Tucson shooting. And extending background checks to cover private gun transfers might also block gun acquisition by ordinary criminals, even if they are ineffective against deranged and powerfully motivated mass killers.

Using mass killings as a springboard to advance the cause of gun control may make sense politically, but it carries with it grave risks if the policies devised in the aftermath of these tragedies are tailored to the specifics of these highly unusual kinds of murders.

—Mr. Kleck is a professor of criminology at Florida State University and the author of "Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control."

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.